Right To Reply #3: Part Three

The subject: The future of recorded music

The participants:
Ben - your host
Nick - Contributing Editor for Stylus and author of Auspicious Fish
Simon - the one and only Mr No Rock & Roll Fun
Leon - Portsmouth's very own musical renegade
Kenny - the man behind the hand and the brains behind ace popcult blog Parallax View
Jez - Stereolab afficionado instrumental in introducing me to the delights of The Smiths and The Wedding Present
He Who Cannot Be Named - the shadowy figure behind Excuse Me For Laughing

Has the record industry been left behind by the pace of change, or is it catching up? Could / should it be doing more? Have they got any legitimate cause to gripe about loss of earnings?

Jez: Yes they can gripe, well sort of anyway. They have been overcharging for years and now they have to try and justify that without a material product. However, illegal downloading is theft. There are degrees, though.

Leon: In principle I am totally for the free downloading of music. As a musician I wouldn’t want someone making money out of something I had created but this isn’t why people download for free. In my experience the majority of people downloading stuff for free are doing it for their own personal use or to preview a CD before actually going out and buying it.

Jez: I don’t care if someone wants to download a U2 song (although I can’t think why they would) but if a band is independent, and there will be a steep rise in these, then they should get the money they not only deserve but also need. Just because it’s entertainment doesn’t mean it should be free. This is an industry we are talking about here, it’s naive to think otherwise. If somebody decides to get their carrots from a local shop rather than Tesco do they expect to get them free because they are supporting small businesses? Do they fuck.

Nick: The internet won’t kill music in exactly the same way that home taping didn’t, that digital recording at home (Minidisc, in other words) didn’t, that CDs didn’t kill vinyl (well, OK, they maimed vinyl, but DJs exist and clubs exist so vinyl will never die). And when I say music I mean the music industry; the current climate is nothing more than a crisis, and if we know anything we know that crises are always overcome. There are too many records still being sold, too much money still being made, too many people still with an interest in the business side to let everything go to pot (or P2P). After all, if people didn’t buy records then other people wouldn’t be able to afford to make records and then no-one would have anything to download in the first place…

He Who Cannot Be Named: The record industry is a pack of decaying dinosaurs who just want to screw everyone, and I mean everyone, for maximum profits. I despise them for their gall in complaining about loss of profits, as if they were creating the product rather than channelling it. Of course I'm not talking about the Rough Trades of this world, but all record companies should go in whatever direction the consumer is, rather than try to criminalise them. It has no legitimate gripe about loss of earnings because like any business it feeds demand and demand changes. Our custom is not their God-given right but a favour we are doing to them.

Simon: Of course, the record industry is right to be upset by downloading – and it's understandable why it was reluctant to create a legal download to take on the illegal downloads until the very last moment. Because the whole concept of downloading makes the current business model obsolete and – while it makes their back catalogue worth more – it brings into doubt the question of how much of a future the labels have as creators of talent.

Leon: For years, the number of ‘independent acts’ that the major record labels have signed and promoted has been in decline. (When I say ‘independent acts’ I’m referring to bands or artists that wouldn’t be considered strictly commercial – recent examples might be Franz Ferdinand or Goldfrapp. I’m not suggesting these acts are signed to majors, just that they are examples of the type of music major record labels would consider ‘risky’.) No big shocks there. However, this situation won’t be exacerbated by the rise in downloading. Even without downloads I think the labels would have continued to limit the amount of money spent on less commercially viable acts.

Simon: One of the justifications the RIAA and their lil' copies round the globe make for charging loads for CDs is that they need to make lots of cash from the hits in order to fund the flops – only by all of us paying fifteen quid for U2 and The Darkness can The Man hope to support the careers of the Help She Can’t Swims and The Delays.

Leon: The ‘downloading will destroy grass roots music’ argument is a convenient one for the labels to drag out to try and prick the conscience of those who care about music. Are they really suggesting that if I download Madonna’s back catalogue some band in Norwich won’t get signed this week? Of course not. Partly because there is no-one looking out for talent in anywhere other than London or, perhaps, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Partly because the majors are happily swallowing up the independents. But mainly because the majors have no intention of spending money on ‘new’ music – they want to endlessly re-package and recycle through endless money-spinning compilations.

Kenny: Like pretty much all large corporations, the music business is crippled by short-term thinking, number-crunching morons and people who believe their own PR hype to such a degree that they have become just as deluded and detached from reality as your average schizoidal panhandler. I have no sympathy for them whatsoever and have no interest in their predicament at all, which is as solemnly predictable as karma.

Leon: What do we gain from the current situation, where our independent / alternative acts are swallowed up and spat out? Loads of people complain that too much time is given by the media to commercial crap. But the same people seem to complain when the acts they like break through (‘sell out’). So why don’t we save everyone’s time and leave the commercial stuff to the labels, and seek out the good stuff ourselves?